Naked Photographer

A Kassen

Madrid

24.01.1514.03.15

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Press release

Maisterravalbuena is pleased to present the third individual exhibition of this Danish collective in our gallery.
In this occasion, A Kassen presents its last project under the title “Naked Photographer” where other artists, whose work is linked to photography and are connected with A Kassen’s activities, have taken part. The collaboration consisted in each artist taking a picture of the clothes they were wearing at that moment, in a way that they had to take their clothes off in order to be able to take the photograph. The Project insists on a recurring idea, present in previous works of A Kassen, where the functions of the image and the format swap, and the performing action that precedes the photograph is situated in the same symbolic place as the image. This questioning of the representation could be seen in previous series such as “Encirclement”, 2012; “Reflection”, 2011; “Stone”, 2011; “Doors”, 2012, or “Slope”, 2013.
In this exhibition, each photograph is entitled with the generic name of the project and, in brackets, the name of the artist. For example, “Naked Photographer” (Jonathan Monk). When linking the title with the image in the picture, we instinctively think of the action that has been left out. The image leads us to the individual who took the photograph as if it were a reflection of him or her. Thus, a game of aesthetic categories takes place, making us wonder whether the main reason of the work is in what we see or in what remains hidden, as well as making us think about the logic of the represented object.
The project also digs into the function of the artist and his position before his work. For this exhibition, A Kassen only informed the rules of the game, and merely picked up the artists who would take part in the project, thus being their actions the ones that provide the exhibition with content and form. Each artist chose the technique, the size and the formalization of each photograph, and each one has understood the project in a very different way from the idea that A Kassen might have had. Matters such as authorship, identity, concealment, drill or representation have been put forward in different ways in each of the pictures through the election of clothes and space.
Artists such as Julian Charriêre, Jacob Aue Sobol, Ignasi Aballi or Marcius Galanhan have figured out the project as a self-portrait. Other artists, as Elmgreen & Dragset, instead of understanding it as a representation of themselves, have linked it to their own artistic practice. The image of Ingar Dragset that we can see on a mobile phone through Instagram, brings us to memory the series “Powerless Structures”, where two pairs of jeans lying on the floor of different exhibition spaces are shown. In other cases, as Anna Molska or Elina Brotherus, they present a fiction that shows a character or a scene, leaving the identity of the artist hidden.